Monthly Archives: March 2011

Front Porch Forum continues to expand its community-communication service in Vermont. Today, Johnson FPF launched and already 50 local households are on board. Other recent additions include Hubbardton, Walden, and Worcester.

FPF helps nearby neighbors connect and build community by hosting regional networks of online neighborhood forums. More than 25,000 Vermont households participate, including greater than 40% of many towns and neighborhoods.

I genuinely appreciate your efforts in providing this platform. At a time when so much media are dominated by very large very powerful interests, Front Porch Forum provides a very useful citizen-based platform.

In 1979, I was part of the first semi-official American delegation to the People’s Republic of China after we normalized relations. I was inspired by seeing thousands of Chinese standing 5-6 rows deep to read the message and grievances posted on Beijing’s Democracy Wall. Perhaps that was an early Chinese version of Front Porch Forum.

As the name suggests, VTDigger aims to provide deep coverage of local issues in the Green Mountain State. “I wanted to follow stories in-depth,” explains Anne Galloway, the publication’s editor-in-chief. “Not all of our stories are investigative; but we want them all to go deep.”…

EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news site acquired by msnbc.com in August 2009, unveiled a new version Monday designed to encourage conversation and collaboration among neighbors.

“We’re shifting from a one-way newsfeed to more of a community-empowered website,” says EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty. “Instead of going to the site to passively consume information, we’re going to offer a platform for posting messages to your neighbors, to discover who lives near you.”

In addition to the neighborhood-specific news, business reviews, crime reports and real estate listings the site delivered previously, a slew of new features encourages users to share and discuss local news, meet one another and coordinate neighborhood activities. Users will be able to create profiles, post about events and other topics of interest, as well as find neighbors who “follow” the same places to connect with those with similar tastes. (Soon, Holovaty says, the site hopes to integrate Foursquare’s API, but for now it will show neighbors who follow the same places on EveryBlock.)

Adrian and his team are doing great work. He goes on to say…

“The web doesn’t yet offer an easy and effective way for people to post messages to their neighbors,” Holovaty explains. “Other social media tools are focused on people you already know — professional colleagues, friends, family. But how many people become Facebook friends with their neighbors?” he asks.

Front Porch Forum plays this role in our many Vermont pilot communities, and various blogs and e-lists do the same in hundreds of various neighborhoods across North America. The first proof of social media, of course, is adoption… do people use it? We’ll have to wait and see how EveryBlock fares on that front. The second proof — can they make it pay? — well, I imagine Everyblock has more breathing room with deep-pocketed MSNBC.com holding the purse strings.

UPDATE: This bit from the Nieman Journalism Lab includes several more write ups about EveryBlock’s news. The interview on Poynter is especially informative…

Holovaty answered a lot of questions about the redesign in a Poynter chat, saying that the site’s mission has changed from making people informed about their area as an end in itself to facilitating communication between neighbors in order to improve their communities. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram applauded the shift in thinking, arguing that the main value in local news sites is in the people they connect, not in the data they collect. At 10,000 Words, Jessica Roy noted that the change was a signal that hyperlocal sites should focus not just on the online realm, but on fostering offline connections as well.

The Hale Street Gang exhibit will arrive in Fairfield early June. This exhibit features work and portraits of twelve senior citizens who gather once a week to read aloud from their memoirs-in-progress. Their clubhouse is the Greater Randolph Senior Center, an elderly mansion in a neighborhood south of the railroad tracks. Together they weave a “collective memoir” of life in twentieth-century America, with the village of Randolph, Vermont as its nexus.

The Library, Fairfield Center School and the Community Center in East Fairfield aim to bring a Fairfield component to this exhibit. Our hope is that the seniors, seventh graders, and community members will respond to a variety of prompts on Front Porch Forum. Community members are encouraged to respond to a weekly prompt – there are only three, so pay close attention! Your response can be short and sweet or long and thought provoking! There is not right or wrong answer – we just want you to reflect on living in Fairfield. Watch for next week’s first prompt and respond to the forum as a whole or to the library as an individual! Let’s work on creating a “collective memoir” of life in Fairfield!

I look forward to reading submissions!

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I’m a new member of Front Porch Forum and I’ve been enjoying it. Like the forum my life is mostly made up of dog poop and broken washing machines. Occasionally something, like Allison’s post, will remind me that there are bigger and perhaps more important things going on in the world.

The other day, while waiting on the Green for the ACTR bus to Middlebury, I got to thinking of Allison’s letter, of the middle east and Japan, of how the world changes, of how the world presents a smooth surface of seemingly unchangeable realities, of ways of living, of how things are and then the next day, the next moment they aren’t. It’s as if we woke up in an alternative universe. Passive, downtrodden people are suddenly protesting all over the middle east, Japan is…God knows what, but radically different than yesterday. What we took for granted as solid and unchangeable is revealed in hindsight as having been standing ready to transform. Sometimes it’s the gentlest of pushes, sometimes it’s a huge shove that we thought could never happen.

So I was at the bus stop and thinking about buses…

He goes on to talk about how taking the bus cuts down on his eco-impact and offers tips for others considering taking this step.

Greg adds his two cents:

Thank you for so eloquently putting to words what many of us have been feeling. Sadness, anger, fear -out of control. It is time (past time) for a new understanding of our impact on the planet and others. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to tell others how you feel. THANK YOU.

Here’s Allison’s original FPF posting, entitled “Small World”…

I’ve been thinking a lot about Japan, lately (anyone else?) and having some of the same feelings I was having while I watched oil spew endlessly into the Gulf (still having those feelings, actually, since the mess is far from over): frustration, anger, intense sadness. The frustration comes from witnessing a terrible thing which appears to be completely out of my control. The anger feels fierce. Sometimes I want to scream until blood vessels burst, but who would I scream at anyway? We all use nuclear power, we all use gas and oil, we all use electricity, in some way. On the bad days, when the anger is particularly stubborn, it’s all gloom and doom: we’re never going to learn, are we? We’re just going to sit here and wonder why the world is cracking open all around, but not do a thing to change the habits which possibly contribute to the cracking. And then come the moments of grace and surrender: driving to work the day after the huge blizzard last week, when the air was clear and frigid. The previous night’s wind had sculpted the fields with lines and ridges, and moisture from Bristol Pond hung over everything like a veil. I wanted to stop my car and watch the morning unfold, and I felt so thankful to live here, on this planet. And the sadness? Too much to put into this post. The questions “what can I do? How can I help?” frequently run through my head. There are as many different answers to these questions as there are people who ask them. Here are some of my answers: use less; less electricity, less gas and oil. Slow down a little. Take a moment to do something which pleases my heart. Grow pretty things in my yard. Grow edible things in my yard. Grow medicine. Stay healthy. Eat good food. Sing more. Breathe deeply. Slow down (I’m saying it twice because I need the extra reminder).

Japan doesn’t really seem so far away, to me. We all live in this web. Air is circulated all over the globe. Currents move many things. The bigger the disaster, the smaller this planet becomes. And I’m saying this, again, because I need the reminder. Because there’s a small part of me saying “I’m so glad that didn’t happen here. I’m so glad that didn’t happen to me…” But the thing is, it DID happen to me. It’s happening to all of us. It happened to us in the Gulf of Mexico, in Alaska, at Chernobyl (excuse the spelling, I guessed on that one). When something happens on this planet, it happens to all of us, whether we’re in the midst of the rubble or somewhere else. And I, for one, haven’t forgotten there’s a nuclear power plant not too far from here. Nor do I believe for one second we are capable of building something which can withstand the force of Mother Nature. There’s hope in all of this. When I can sit still with my breath, let go of the anger and move through the sadness, I can begin to feel excited about the changes we could make. When I can sit still with my breath, I can remember I’m not a hero. I can’t “save the world,” but I can grow peas!! I can grow sunflowers and carrots and lavender; winter squash and tomatoes. ….. I have many mantras I repeat to myself, but “baby steps” is going to have to be my newest. Viewed as a whole, the changes are many and almost overwhelming. So I make one small change and go from there…

I’m thankful to be living in a neighborhood where I can see many others making small positive changes towards a more sustainable way of life.

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Would the young man, Josh, who pushed my Prius out of the snow with his car on Monday morning, please let me know: (1) his favorite brand of beer and (2) where I can drop it off? Thanks so much, Josh.

That’s from Mike in Burlington today on his neighborhood’s South End Front Porch Forum. We’ve been flooded this week with snow-related calls for help and subsequent postings of gratitude from the recently shoveled out. A record-breaking blizzard followed by a huge outpouring of neighbor-helping-neighbor community spirit… love it.

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AOL is acquiring the hyperlocal blog aggregator Outside.in for $10 million, reports TechCrunch. That’s $4.4 million less than Outside.in’s total funding to date. As you might imagine, AOL plans to integrate Outside.in’s aggregation in Patch, its network of hyperlocal news sites.

The acquisition means that Patch can beef up its coverage through aggregation, which conceivably would include links to competing hyperlocal newspapers and blogs. Or similarly, Patch can reduce its original coverage by relying more on aggregation. Either way, today’s news illustrates that AOL is still invested in Patch’s success.

UPDATE: Good commentary going on about this acquisition and broader themes… here, here and elsewhere. A concise analysis was offered in this tweet about mega-chains of hyperlocal sites…

because they have no soul — RT @marshallk: why haven’t hyperlocal news services like Outside.in, Everyblock or Fwix won over the public? mathewi